Mail attachments showing up as garbled inline text (code)

Running 10.5.6 with Mail 3.5
Receiving attachments to emails is inconsistent. Sometimes a Word document is received with an email just fine. Other times it will be attached by the sender (in the usual manner) but will show up in my email as inline text (just garbled text or code). If the email is sent to my gmail account, the Word doc is fine.
I am not sure what to look for since the symptoms seem to be inconsistent.

I have had the same problem for a long time. What burns me up is that I think I understand it, and there isn't a darn thing I can do about it --- short of using a different email client.
Examine one of these emails with the garbled text in place of attachment. If you're having the same problem I am, then when you use view -> message -> raw source, just before the attachment you will see something like this:
Content-Disposition: inline;
Multi-part MIME format messages can specify whether their sub-parts are meant to be viewed inline. If it is inline, often Mail will render images and PDF documents as you might expect, but many other file types are rendered as plain text. This even happens with files generated by applications Apple ought to be smarter about, such as iCal. I suppose that from Apple's point of view, the fault lies elsewhere. The sender's email client ought to be smart enough to let them send attachments as attachments. Unfortunately, some mail clients (Thunderbird in particular) seem to always mark outgoing attachments as inline, and Apple Mail does not have the flexibility to treat it in any other way.

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    <pre wrap><html>
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